what you wanted

{via}

Papercuts - Future Primitive {Ruby Suns remix}

I can't listen to this song without thinking of it as having come from a dream. It has that inside-your-head darkness to it, like walking the beach alone at night, waves murmuring up the sand, cliffs walling dark and huge behind you. I imagine the songwriter awakening in the morning light, where none of it works, and only coming back to the song after night has fallen, when it makes sense, when that great towering guitar figure comes to life again, stretching and reaching in the dark like some weird old tree. It takes days to convince himself that the song works, that it's not just his imagination, because that weird guitar, the humming strings, they get into your head too, and they don't leave.

{Buy}

you and me

{via}

Arcade Fire - Accidents

I'm walking through the city, clouded in a fog so thick it's wet on my face, like kisses left by some forgotten mouth. I'm feeling weird and lonely, like I could fall in love with any of the girls who give me a second look. Walking past the train station, I see the couples clinging together sadly like tired flowers, waiting to be parted. I want to get home, but the impulse to sit and watch people is too much. They sigh, and reach, and kiss, and mouth messages to each other through the carriage windows. A whistle is blown, the gruff fuss of an engine starting up, and people are dragged away from one another.
There's something of that here, in this scruffy pre-Funeral demo - the desire to get inside the mundane world that we all ignore, to watch everything that goes on, hidden, all-seeing. When you get in that mood, it takes something special to get you out of it.

---

Unrelatedly, the debut album by Auld Lang Syne is a thing of phenomenal beauty. The new version of 'Where My Fortune Lies' is like some sort of spiritual experience. I can't wait to see what the world makes of it.

hey you

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Page France - No One Likes a Bleeder

If I was singing this song, it would be about something else. It would be about the friend that reaches to you with a hug at the end of the night, big and surprising and meaningful. It's that dazed smile that seems to have found you, as you walk home under streetlights and the paling blue stretching out above you, waning into dawn. You sing along with everything you see, thinking about that sudden embrace, happy and warm and silent in one another, and you are happy, and patient. It's something you're still clinging to even alone on the street, knowing that there will be something beautiful to remember when you awake, all-of-a-sudden. It's nights like this when you don't care how long the walk home takes. You've never felt less alone.

{Buy Sister Pinecone, one of the most perfect little EPs ever}

figure out the rest

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - Northfield, MN

The sparseness that comes to life in this song reminds me of the feeling of spending the whole day indoors, barely straying from your room, not leaving the house. A day where no daylight really reaches you, only slotting through the window in patches, where the curtain isn't fixed. You're alone with your house, and have only empty rooms for company. You arise unthinkingly for whatever food you have lying around, and you see through the window that dusk is there, clouding and inking the sky at the edge of your sight, and from inside the house, night may as well be something like a blanket that's tossed over the roof, settling over the windows, keeping your yellow electric light inside. I have always hated these days, days when you are surprised to learn how lazy and sleepy things can be.

Vs. Children is very fine, and it is out now.

Inlets in concert

Watch the full concert here

It's been far too long, but finally there's some more new material coming from Inlets. It may not feature Zach Condon, as did the last track from the band to surface, but watching this concert at the Music Hall of Williamsburg is reminder enough of the songwriting skills of Sebastian Krueger. The above video is a fine performance of old favourite 'Pictures of Trees', from the ever-gorgeous Vestibule EP.

Inlets - Pictures of Trees

i don't play to win

St. Vincent - The Strangers

This week I came home for the first time since Christmas, and found so many of the old things that brought me back to who I was, twenty or so years ago. I hit a nostalgia nerve, and found myself digging through old boxes, and presses, and finding artifacts of a childhood that I'd long since grown out of, along with VHS and sugary breakfast cereal. Still, I tried to get myself back there, sitting in front of cartoons, old Disney stories in technicolour telling stories that I've forgotten, with music that never left me - great winding ribbons of melody mixing together with old-style animation, the kind that in my mind looks grainy and powdery from the tape running thin.

This song is like this, but all grown up, like Alice going back to Wonderland as an adult. Annie Clark uses the same lazy winding tunes that my kid self loved, and wraps them around her earnest lyrics, and instrumental uneasiness. It works on me, and I remember that an adult is just a grown-up child, and I sit listening to this song again and again, loving it.

Actor is out on May 4th. So far it's wonderful.

the wire (and one of the more unusual ways it has affected my life)

The National - Fake Empire

I know it sounds a bit odd, but once you make this link, it'll be pretty hard to remember that it's Matt Berninger and not Bunk Moreland (the man with a voice like "an oak blowjob") crooning away all forlorn and wry. I'll never listen to Boxer in the same way again.
Just play that song, and look at that picture when the vocals come in. It's uncanny. Imagine how great a music video it would make.

happy birthday us

Sufjan Stevens - Happy Birthday (live)

The Torture Garden is four years and one week old today.

That's pretty good, even if I didn't find time to mark it last week, as intended.

I will make a bigger deal of the fifth birthday, but to mark this one, here are all the demos that Cathy was kind enough to share with us over the past weeks. Considering the early demo of 'Sing for your Supper' was the first song to really move me to write properly, I think it's fitting.

Cathy Davey - Little Red (demo)
Cathy Davey - In He Comes (demo)
Cathy Davey - Army of Tears (demo)
Cathy Davey - The Nameless (demo)
Cathy Davey - Wild Rum (demo)
Cathy Davey - The Touch (demo)

Thanks to everyone for reading, commenting, and writing back over the last few years. It's been appreciated.

count the flowers

Cathy Davey - The Nameless (demo)

These two songs are rather wild and unflinching, the kind of thing I'm not used to hearing in music too often. In their nervousness, they're like the traces of that punch-to-the-gut shock that waits just out of sight, some sudden tragedy. The winding vocals in 'The Nameless', or the insistent refrain like a grieving widow at the end of 'Army of Tears', these are things we'd rather not notice. Like the wet gleam left by headlights on a black spot on the road outside your home town, reminding you of the slowed traffic and flashing lights you've seen waiting there, as you tap on your dashboard, and fiddle with the car radio.

Cathy Davey - Army of Tears (demo)

The same sea air you breathe in on Sunday walks, that could be the last gasp drawn in by some swimmer out of sight, lost in the tide. Any of the cars that pass you tomorrow could become someone's coffin. This is the kind of thing we try to forget about, because it can't be changed or helped. But there's nothing quite like the whispery little feeling of being reminded. It's hard not to take it personally.

These are the last of the demos we're sharing from Cathy's new material. You can read more about it here, and find the first two here. Thanks to Cathy for being so madly generous. She's the third best thing about Irish music right now, don't you know - unless you're me, in which case you know that Holmes and Jape ain't got nothing on her.

Miroir Noir

Miroir Noir, Arcade Fire's rather wonderful tour film, is online for one week only, courtesy of Pitchfork. If you're not doing anything for the next 90 minutes, hit that link, make a cup of tea and click play.